Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen was the concentration camp to which Anne Frank and Margot Frank were transferred from Auschwitz at the end of October 1944. Both sisters died there during the typhus epidemic of the winter of 1944–1945, making the camp the final place in Anne’s life and the setting of her death only months before its liberation.

Transfer from Auschwitz

After the residents of the Secret Annex were arrested, they were taken first to a prison in Amsterdam and then to Westerbork, the transit camp in the north of the Netherlands. On September 3, 1944, they were deported in the last transport to leave Westerbork, arriving in Auschwitz three days later. Anne and Margot were subsequently transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen at the end of October.

Conditions and deaths

The account identifies a typhus epidemic, which broke out during the winter of 1944–1945 amid horrendous hygienic conditions, as the cause of thousands of prisoners’ deaths. Margot died in the epidemic, and Anne died a few days later. The exact dates are not established: Anne is said to have died in late February or early March, and the account states that the bodies of both sisters were probably placed in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves.

Liberation and significance

British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 12, 1945. The date underscores the short interval between Anne’s death and the end of the camp’s imprisonment, but liberation came too late for her and Margot. In the biographical account accompanying the diary, Bergen-Belsen marks the end of Anne’s life, while the diary she had been forced to stop writing on August 1, 1944, survived her and reached readers through postwar publication.